Fairly recently I used a beautiful painting of Fernando Vicente in order to illustrate (quite literally I have to say) my article about Deleuze’s concept of the body as a Desiring Machine. It turns out that this Spanish artist has a whole series of those painting that he calls Anatomias that represent sections within women’s bodies as seen as machines both erotic and frightening at the same time. It is very likely that there would be a feminist reading of this work, as much as the one of Zola further in this article; however, I won’t be the one doing it here.
It is actually interesting to notice that, when one would think of a machine as a de-sexualized entity, F. Vicente’s bodies are highly sexualized and thus literally embody successfully this concept of desiring machine, or the human body seen as a productive entity.
In his novel La Bete Humaine (1890), French XIXth century author Emile Zola accomplishes the opposite of F.Vicente’s bodies by describing all along his book a locomotive as a woman. Never this comparison would be as strong as when this same locomotive -that even has a female name “La Lison” is involved in an accident and “dies” from it as described in the following paragraph (that I did not find in English and I had to translate myself which is terrible when one knows how beautiful is Zola’s prose…sorry about that):
